


I shall be a blue sky, so that you may be the sun

by PastelWonder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alcohol & Smoking, Canon Universe, Dark Kylo Ren, F/M, Frightening & Intense Scenes, Hux Redemption, Inspired by the themes of Ex Machina, Mentions of Rape, Profanity, Rey Underage, Sex & Nudity, Violence & Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2019-10-20 13:48:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17623532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: He is there when the Sith finally captures her.It is not in a blaze of glorious fire, nor is it between clashing sabers spitting fast-fading sparks of acid light. It is in stealth and stratagem, a slick, calculated slither through detectors and defenses. A liquid-fast strike to the heart.Later, alone inside his stark quarters, he cannot stop picturing her slender feet swaying small and soot-smeared over the arm of the Sith.Perhaps because it was the moment he began to doubt.





	1. Virulent

He is there when the Sith finally captures her.

It is not in a blaze of glorious fire, nor is it between clashing sabers spitting fast-fading sparks of acid light. It is in stealth and stratagem, a slick, calculated slither through detectors and defenses. A liquid-fast strike to the heart.

The Sith slays his mother without flourish, teeth bared and eyes burning black hatred as her body halts and trembles, clinging onto hope like ash clings to ember, before peeling apart. Sealed and cauterized by his sword, her halves glisten like split fruit at his feet. Her commander dies not a moment later, his execution as swift and inelegant. His head bounds away from his body, landing where among the ravage the General never knows.

They burned the bunker afterwards.

She is not allowed to make a final stand, the junk-trader’s slave from Jakku. Nor is she allowed the dignity of gruesome death. Rather, she is dragged out clawing and shrieking, in a nightshift the Sith rips cleanly off her small, young body before he rapes her in full sight of his Empire. He roars his triumph over the Light.

If the General lives to be a hundred, he will yet remember the girl’s screaming.

When it is finished, she is carried tenderly, thighs bloodied and eyes unblinking, up the steel maw of their lite-craft.

Later, alone inside his stark quarters, the General cannot stop picturing her slender feet swaying small and soot-smeared over the arm of the Sith.

Perhaps because it was the moment he began to doubt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 _“Go and bring her,”_ says the Sith.

So that is what he does.

“Your-” he hesitates. The word is caught on his indignation. It won’t quite come out.

“Your _Majesty,_ ” he raps smartly, striking thrice. “Please open the door.”

“No!” she screams. It is so rending and heartbroken that he nearly flinches.

Nearly.

“Go ‘way!”

He sighs through his nose. “I am coming in, on the count of three.”

Why, Lord why is he counting?

“One… two…” his retinol scan opens the pneumatic door with a graceful _wisssh_.

She is completely nude.

Her opulent wedding dress is in tatters at her bare feet. Her hairstyle is torn and listing, the rouge and shadows applied painstakingly to her face all run together in muddled streaks down her cheeks and chin. Her jewels are scattered across the carpet, a constellation of aggrieved stars, while her irremovable collar, the one that suppresses her magics and keeps her bound to this ship, blips benignly at her throat. Marks mar almost every inch of her smooth, juvenile body. The ones the Sith made are deep-set and mournfully blue. The others are fresh and shallow, they crisscross red-raw over her belly and her breasts.

 _Grief,_ he pities, _not Majesty. Your Grief…_

The room is heavily perfumed and filled on every surface with fragrant flora, lush, magnificent blooms from every corner of the Galaxy. Through them, he can smell her tears and acrid sweat.

“Get out!” she bays as, cautiously, he navigates the ravage.

Then she falls to her knees at his feet.

“Please,” her hands wring the hem of his officer’s jacket. He is overwhelmed with the urge to kick away.

He doesn’t.

“ _Please-”_

It’s as if he’s another man in that moment, the way he hunkers down upon his heels and tucks his finger beneath her chin.

“Take heart, girl,” only the very corners of his eyes crease with kindness. “You may slay him yet.”

Her sobbing breath catches, and when her eyes look into his they-

 _Oh_.

How can a creature as unlucky as she still dare to hope?

 _She is fire,_ he recognizes.

Though she still shudders, she takes the gloved hand he offers and slowly rises.

“I’m naked,” she says, as if suddenly recalling a late engagement. “I- I- I-”

He waits patiently through her grieving, shell-shocked stutters.

“I r-ripped my dr-dr-dress-”

“Then shall we find you another.”

He abandons her shivering in the center of the room with her arms wrapped around her waist, thoughtless of her bare breasts or sex. He opens a hydraulic panel in the wall to reveal her wardrobe and chooses the least salacious item.

He tucks her into it like a child into bed, gathering it loosely in his hands and bending for her to step into it as she holds his shoulders.

One-by-one, the sleeves slip over her slender arms. His gloved hand looks clinical and cruel against the fragile lace as he gently draws the zipper up her back. He moves to tidy her hair, how exactly he has no idea, but stops short when she says, “No.”

Her eyes follow his as he steps away, and surely she was never this small. She must have shrunk while he was dressing her, because when he looks in full he sees just a little girl.

She turns and assesses herself inside the mirror.

A few frazzled tendrils from her hair dance lightly upon her shoulders, stirred by the cycling vents above. Her chest between collar and dress is welted, eyes are swollen and red.

“Leave it,” she smears her fingers through the paint on her cheeks. They land delicately on her collar, as if in pose. Her mouth trembles, but her eyes are alight with hatred. “He wants a Jakku slave for a queen, ‘e gets one.”

“That is the spirit,” he stands at-ease behind her. Their eyes meet on the surface of the mirror. “Your Majesty.”

He offers her his arm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was very inspired by the themes in Ex Machina, a gorgeous, important film. If you haven't seen it, I cannot recommend it to you enough.
> 
> Your comments and kudos are appreciated. If you would like to be friends, find me on Tumblr: https://royramsey.tumblr.com/


	2. Azure

She sits bored and forlorn in meetings.

 _“A new order to the Galaxy,”_ the Sith still caws in his mania. Like a great black vulture, he circles systems and worlds as he harbingers their deaths. _“A new order to the Galaxy-”_

The girl says nothing.

In fact, he would think her mute, if he hadn’t already heard her speak. Though perhaps he’d merely dreamed that scene on her wedding day, if one could call it that.

The memory makes him feel vaguely uneasy, as though he’s unwittingly committed a crime. Surely it is against the Sith’s law when, over the topic of resource scarcity in the Western Reaches, her dull eyes suddenly look directly into his across the table, and his heart grips with a fathomless emotion.

_Guilt._

Someone else is speaking, an agricultural specialist from the Imperial Research Institute, explaining to her in simplified terms the impossibility of feeding so many mouths given current crop yields, when over him, she says, “General?”

Her voice is whisper-soft.

He inclines his head at her wonderingly. So, he notes, does the Sith, where he looms beside to her in his chair.

A room of thirteen cabinet members is pin-drop silent.

“Your Majesty?”

He waits with bated breath.

“Get these people fed, please.” She shakes her head. Her adornments chime musically, an innocent warble inside this black soiree called politics. Her collar shines dully beneath the blue lights. “Not just for one day. All of them.”

A second lapses. Then two.

He nods once. “Certainly, ma’am.”

“Thank you.” Her seat glides back smoothly from the table as she stands. The rest of the room stands with her.

She does not notice. She is looking at the Sith, the only one who is still seated. “I want to go for a walk.”

He takes her hand, small and gleaming with many precious rings, and kisses it.

She does not hide her disgust.

“Whatever you like, beloved,” the menace slowly unfolds until he is dark and towering above her. She takes his arm, and does not look back at the room as they leave.

But the General stares after her, watching her retreat in the clutch of her dark gown. The very top of her hairstyle hardly reaches the Sith shoulder.

After the trail of her gown disappears around the corner, he looks around the room at the others.

_Well then._

“Dismissed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“She is so smug,” observes Phasma.

The Captain and he stand shoulder-to-shoulder behind the transparisteel barrier above the hanger, watching the Sith inspect his troopers below. They move slowly down the ranks, the Darth Lord and his Cimmerian sunchild, pausing whenever she wishes to speak to a soldier.

“She is a child,” he murmurs, seeing her laugh at something a trooper has said. She touches the shoulder of his armor before she and the Sith move on.

Even from up high, he can see the Sith’s besotted smirk. So does the Captain.

“She is a distraction,” she seethes. The hideousness of her newly grafted features, warped and mangled by fire, is exceeded by the ugliness of her tone.

Though the girl is already on the next row speaking with another soldier, the one whom she laughed for still faintly smiles at-attention.

“Yes,” the General has to agree.

_Very distracting._

“It doesn’t matter,” the Captain drags a breath in through her nose and stands taller. “He’ll grow tired of her, like all the others,” his gut twists at the malicious promise in her tone, “Her fate will find her.”

“Yes.”

The General has to agree.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the Sith finds him, he is alone inside the officer’s lounge, a splash of strong drink and a cigarette in one hand, the other folded behind his back, gazing out of the long, narrow viewport at the stars.

 _“Amrie,”_ the soft, beautiful woman in his memory smiles down at him. He reaches for her, a seedling straining upwards towards the sun. Her hair falls slowly all around him, her large, sad eyes are loving in the light. _“What does my sweet boy want?”_

“You’re thinking about your mother,” the Sith’s sudden murmur is sinister even without his mask.

To his credit, the General does not startle.

“No, actually.” With grace and practice, he draws a curtain down over his mind. Like a bird of prey loosing track of a scuttling rat, the cool shadow that hunts above him swoops away.

 _Ah, to be vermin,_ he thinks ruefully.

The price one pays for hesitation.

“Rather, I was thinking of yours.” He lifts his drink and drains it in one long, elegant draft. The too-near scent of scorching tobacco is a merciless comfort, like the burning now in his throat and in his gut.

“My mother?” the Sith tilts his head. His sleek mane glints deadly under the lamps.

“Quite.” The General looks into the empty glass. A fragment of his reflection stares back at him from the bottom, where the glass is thickest. Glossy from the last dregs of whiskey, he is amber shadow and light.

He wants to smash himself against the stars.

 _“Don’t be maudlin,”_ his father seethes from the beyond. “ _It’s womanly.”_

“I was recalling the first time I met her. She was a brilliant woman. Formidable.” Unable to bear the sight of himself in the glass any longer, he sets down it beside the decanter and pours himself another shallow draught. “Though I suppose they all were. For rebel scum.”

“Mm,” says the Sith.

He circles around him as the General takes a slow pull from his cigarette. Its smoke is drawn by the vents for that purpose set into the paneling of the high wall. Like fog creeping into darkness.

How long has it been since he’s seen the sun?

Predictably, the Sith takes his drink without apology or preamble. His dark eyes mock the General’s over the glass as he drains it.

 _Dignity,_ he muses, _what was that like?_

The Sith smacks his lips before he wipes them on his armguard. The glass rattles where he almost-tosses it onto the low bar. His congenial grip on the General’s shoulder is brutal.

“There is something you will do for me,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying this, let me know : )
> 
> Have a gorgeousable day.


	3. Cerulean

He finds her on the bridge above the garage.

She’s watching the repair droids flitter to-and-fro, mending ground fleet with their soldering irons and smelt. She is dressed as she always is, like a courtesan, in sumptuous jewels and vivid reds draped luridly around her body. Her face is made up with lacquers and shadows that enhance her round cheeks and large, childish eyes. Except for the heavy collar that gleams demurely beneath her nape, she is like a doll, too delicate and porcelain to be real.

For the hundredth time, he thinks, _Only a coward collars a child._

“Your Majesty,” he calls her. It sounds more natural now, after four months. “I beg your pardon.”

“What?” she says gracelessly. Then she turns and sees it is him. “Oh-”

Her expression shifts. It is not soft, but it’s not hard, precisely. “It’s you.”

He does not leer as the others do. He looks into her eyes as, behind her, a droid’s work produces a flash of white sparks that wreaths her in ethereal light.

“The Supreme Leader wishes me continue your lessons in historical interplanetary politics and-” he pauses apologetically, “ _common language_ , among other subjects, which shall be left to my discretion.”

“Oh,” she repeats. Her gaze lights with tacit amusement as she smooths at her gown. “My language ain’t common enough for him, then?”

Embarrassed on her behalf, he inclines his head. “As you say, ma’am.”

She snorts softly, turning back to the activity below.

“Like I told the last guy, I don’t want to learn to talk. I don’t want to learn politicals, or maths, or mew-sicks,” she watches the sparks sputter, unblinking, “I want to be left alone.”

Hands folded behind him, he steps up to meet her at the transparisteel. There is space enough for another man between them. He hears nothing but the insipid blip of her collar’s transponder while the drone’s carry on mutely behind their barrier. His heartbeats sieve slowly one into the next as the silence unravels like a spool of velvet cloth.

Finally, his murmur breaks the spell. “Nor do I desire to be your governess. Alas. Here we are.”

She snorts again, even softer this time. Just a huff of air through her nose, and a quirk of her painted lips at one corner.

“I don’t want my lessons in the apartment. I hate it there. It’s so cold-”

She turns and lays her hands upon his chest.

The act is not seductive, it is earnest and unthinking. She is a child beneath all her frippery, and the very thought of a man knowing her, when she is still much too tender, strangles his heart. “Your Majesty-”

“Can't I learn somewhere else, please?” she pleads, unheeding when he takes her by her wrists, “General-”

There are a thousand places on aboard this ship in which to give her lessons. Neutral, suitable, appropriate place.

“Come to my quarters at whatever time pleases Leader Ren.”

He fast strides away from her, marshalled and clipped, before she has the chance to thank him.

He does not look back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Lesson one,” he allows her to arrange herself on the floor before he begins.

She declined to sit at the table, saying that the overhead light was too stark. She prefers the diffused warmth of his living room, tucked in-between the sofa and coffee table. Her dress, a deep, sparking blue, pours like spilled sapphires across his dark carpet. The scent of her perfume mingles with the lingering traces of cigarette smoke and the steam from the cup of tea he took in the afternoon.

He looms above her, dressed imperiously in his full, crisp formals. His gloves are on, hands folded firmly behind his back.

Her lips part in anticipation. She holds her stylus above her pad.

“We shall begin with the structure of language.” He gesticulates, “Can you please tell me, Your Majesty, the difference between an adjective and an adverb?”

She shakes her head. Her earrings tinkle brightly. “Def’nitly no.”

“Very well,” he speaks slowly, clearly, as he paces before her, “An adjective is an attributive word or phrase, modifying the noun which it describes.”

“ ‘kay,” she says.

He pauses and angles his chin. “Might you like to write that down?”

She hesitates. Her grip on the stylus, which he had not noticed before is wrong before, tightens harshly. Her lashes flicker, large eyes shining helplessly in the light. “I… I…”

“You cannot write,” it is not a condemnation. Nor is it a question.

Yet she feels compelled to answer.

“They don’t like slaves to read. On Jakku,” she clarifies. Her tone becomes bitter, “It’s different ‘ere, I guess.”

“Your Majesty-”

“Don’t call me that, please. Not here. Not when it’s just- I’m Rey,” she beseeches him quietly, “Just Rey.”

He considers her a long moment, knowing in his gut it is the wrong path to start down. Yet it is a kindness he finds he cannot refuse her.

“Rey,” he repeats, still inclining his head obeisantly.

Almost immediately, he regrets it as his name leaves her lips, fragile and soft. “Ah- Ahm'tage…”

That she stumbles, that she hesitates, tells him she knows it is a transgression. She may call no man by his name but the Sith.

His reproach never comes. Instead, he hunkers down in front of her and gently takes her pen. “Now then, my lady. Shall we begin with our letters?”

She nods.

Carefully, showing her each motion of his hand, he draws on her pad so that the letters appear right to her.

 _Rey_.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She is a brilliant child.

He finds himself looking forward to her lessons. She learns quickly and is voracious about the topics which fascinate her. World cultures, literature, and the arts. Her curiosity is insatiable, her questions as insightful as they are endless, her answers perceptive and complex. She hangs onto his every word as he lectures, and though he praises her sparingly, whenever he does, she cherishes each morsel, leaving his quarters glowing at her little accolades.

It distracts him from the growing heaviness behind his eyes, the unnatural fatigue he feels during quiet lulls in his apartment when he is alone.

Today, he sits at the small metal table against the kitchen wall and smokes a cigarette as she lies on the living room floor, amusing herself with an atlas he had brought up for her from the archives. It is an ancient text, bound in rare leather and printed on even rarer pressed-reed paper. Its large, long pages warble softly as she turns them in wonder, lying on her little belly with her chin on her hand. The skirt of her long gown has fallen to the backs of her knees, exposing her strong calves and bare feet. Her slippers, as usual, have been abandoned somewhere by his sofa. She kicks her legs slowly as she studies the rich schemas of systems and stars.

Classical music murmurs from the speaker in the kitchen, marrying with the hush of the air cycler drawing his smoke up through the vent within the wall. By now he is used to the fragrance of her perfume, lingering comfortably about his rooms after she’s gone. A shadow of comfort in a bleak and lonely life.

He’s reading the latest reports on his holopad, noting distantly the figures and fatalities of yet another world the Sith has brought to heel. His glasses are on for comfort, elbows propped, fingers to his temples. His gloves lie on the table beside his pad.

“Ahm’tage?” she pipes quietly.

“Mm.”

“If you could go anywhere in the Galaxy,” another page sings as it turns, “where would you go?”

_Somewhere warm._

“I don’t know, Coruscant, perhaps?” he scrolls through his pad, looking at one column for a particular sum, “The whiskey there is rather fine.”

She squints at the heading of her page, “You wouldn’t go to Kah-shh-yah-yah-”

“Ka-shee-eek,” he pronounces, tipping a bit of smolder off the end of his cigarette into an ashtray before he sits back. Over the rim of his reading glasses, he considers her. She is lying on her side watching him, her arm making a triangle beneath her. The atlas is spread open in front of her. Her cheek is in her palm. “Is that where you would like to go?”

Her smiles fills the whole apartment with light.

“Yes. Have you been?” she asks earnestly.

He nods. “I have.”

“What’s it like?” she sits up, gown rustling and adornments chiming like childish accompaniment to the music playing softly from the kitchen. Her crystal bodice ripples with lamplight.

He takes a drag off his cigarette as he considers. “Breathtaking.”

“Really?” she’s even more eager, knowing already his aspersion for hyperbole.

Smoke pours through his nostrils and wafts up to the vents above. “The forest there is as old as the Galaxy, some of its trees are as wide as this ship, and taller than you can ever imagine.”

“No,” she breathes, hardly blinking as she stares enraptured.

His lips twitch. “Oh yes. A single leaf can be larger than a man, and the light that slants between them shines like threads of gold.”

He remembers the last time he stood inside that living cathedral, shutting his eyes as he let the warm, humid light burnish his hair to bronze. A man in his early twenties, yet still full of the ambition to own such majesty. To call himself its master.

 _What a fool,_ he thinks with a smile that is sad as it is wry.

Something brushes sweetly against his consciousness, light and feather-soft, like the tips of fingers over long, dew-wet grass. It is her magic, he realizes.

Her eyes are closed, the center of her brow is furrowed deep in concentration. She holds her collar in both her hands, knuckles whitening pitifully against the metal as she gasps quietly, “Show me. _Please_.”

How can he not?

He shuts his eyes and tips back his chin, letting the memory filter forward until he can again _feel_ the sunlight, washing him in grains of gold. It is warmer inside the forest, the smell of gentle rot and living things surrounds him. He recalls the song of birds.

It is many moments before he is back in his cool, dark apartment. The music floats back to him by degrees, as does the scent of stale, recycled air and his nearly-finished cigarette.

And her.

“I want to go there someday,” she whispers. Her eyes are open, liquid against the light. “With you.”

“Ah. Well.”

He does not have the heart to tell her that the planet, and all its beautiful edenic forests and sentient life, are no more.

The Sith had it destroyed.

He studies the cigarette between his fingers. Its paper edges peel back elegantly from the last of its burn.

He stamps it out in the ashtray.

“I believe it is time I returned you to your apartment.”

“Ahm’tage-”

When he looks at her, her parted lips are trembling.

“Don’t dally, girl,” he chides her gently.

He doesn’t look again as he stands and works on his gloves.


	4. Ephemeral

At night, he wanders.

Restlessness is an unwelcome development in his daily habits. He’s never had trouble sleeping before, save for the months of his mother’s illness.

Strange he should remember that sad time so fondly. That he’d spent the last days of her life by her bedside, changing her pans and talking tenderly to her, he now considers to be the greatest of his accomplishments, the weight of all other accolades feather-light against the memory of her body cooling slowly in his arms.

 _Death strips the scales off a man’s eyes,_ he thinks as he walks the empty corridors by their low blue-toned light. _Even if it is not his own._

Unknowingly, his meanderings bring him to the small bridge above the garage. He pauses to watch the droids at their work.

Their sparks glaze the transparisteel in a dazzling fall of lights that paint strange afterimages on the backs of his eyes. Of a girl so small he’d have to bend down to reach her, abandoned in a desert. Her little sunburned hands digging determinedly at the sand.

 _“Compassion,”_ his father slurs from the mantelpiece, _“is the swill with which the weak try to poison the strong.”_

His sigh fogs the glass.

Halfway to his quarters, he hears a sharp whimper from a shadowed corner, like the bleat of a lamb choked off at its throat. It is immediately followed by a seductive, sinister murmur that wrenches his gut.

He looks fraughtfully for a corridor down which to divert, but the narrow hallway is a vector, projecting singularly to the bay at the far end which leads to his private chambers.

He is stranded like an animal in a trap.

Her gentle sob is by now all too familiar, and his mind places all the rest - the soft rustle of her nightdress as she struggles, the slick, sensual sound of the Sith’s wet lips on her skin.

“No- don’t- _stop-”_ she cries.

His eyes flicker shut, he angles his face down and away from them as he clears his throat. “Forgive me, Leader Ren.”

The Sith straightens and turns.

“Hux.”

His black figure seems to fill the hallway, he smiles wide enough to show his teeth as his eyes glint malice. “Taking a walk?”

_He thinks he knows something. He thinks you’re like him._

The thought is so sickening, so ludicrous, that the General wants to laugh.

Behind the Sith, the child trembles. Her hair is down from its usual styling, there are dark, slick welts on her breasts between the neckline of her nightgown and her collar. She is drenched in defenseless rage.

That the monster dragged her down here at this hour for this _hideous_ display is almost more than he can bear. He does her the kindness of not staring as his face schools into a neutral expression. “Good evening, Your Majesty.”

“General-”

Beneath her nightclothes, her small feet are bare. They make soft, infantile slaps against the tile as she pushes her way past the Sith.

The sight of her young face free of cosmetics and utterly humiliated makes the General’s fists clench and his gut roil.

 _I will kill him,_ he decides then and there.

Her mouth tremors, the tears collected in her lashes quiver and fall like gems down her cheeks into her hair.

“Please be careful,” she throws back a seething look at the Sith, “You have no idea what _disgusting beasts_ are slithering around in these halls.”

The beast isn’t looking at her. He’s watching the General intensely.

 _You’ve made your point, you bastard,_ he wants to snarl.

Instead, he folds his arm across his chest, fist over his heart, and bows to the little girl before him. “Good night, ma’am. Sleep well.”

 

 

 

He does not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She takes her next lesson at the table.

Her brow pinches in the concentration as, very carefully, she copies a passage of philosophy from her holopad onto crisp linen paper. Her eyes dart frequently back-and-forth between the screen and her letters, she pauses after almost every word, his pen pressed to her lips, as if pondering their meaning.

He sits across from her, cigarette pinched between his fingers directing the smoke away from her up towards the vents. With his other hand, he points out where her script is leaning and where she’s forgotten to cross her _t_ ’s. He does not mention the meeting in the hallway.

Blessedly, neither does she.

“Ahm’tage,” she pipes, negotiating the pen’s nib around the quarrelsome tail of a _q._ There is swipe of ink upon her cheek. “If dreams come from our _sub_ conscious, and if sub means _underneath-_ ” She pauses to see if he’s still following.

He nods once, “Go on.”

“And sub means underneath,” she repeats, watching him now from beneath her lashes, “then how do we know we aren’t dreamin’ when we’re awake? We cannot _perceive_ our subconsciouses, surely.”

He takes a short draw from his cigarette to hide his grin and ashes it into the tray beside them.

His eyes narrow suspiciously as he folds his arms on the table in front of him. “Young lady. Are you trying to shirk your lesson?”

“I’m bored,” she bleats pitifully, letting her head drop back on her shoulders. Her adornments tinkle.

With all pretext lost, she resorts to soft, kittenish pleading, “Please may we learn something else _,_ Ahm’tage? _Please-_ ”

_We._

He tucks his cigarette between an amused smirk, unable to hide the faint crinkle at the corner of his eyes as he inspects her work. Three-quarters done.

_Well enough._

“Should I teach you a game?”

Her breath catches. She swells with delight. “If you do I’ll love you always. With all my heart.”

“As you say, ma’am,” he rises to collect his playing cards.

 

 

 

She is a supreme hustler, and a vicious little cheat.

Oddly, it makes him proud.

“You’ve played this game before,” he wagers as he raps the deck smartly on the tabletop, preparing to shuffle.

“Never,” she lies boldly. Her eyes watch him keenly for any slight-of-hand.

“Ahm’tage,” she arranges the cards he’s dealt her, fanning them as wide as she can inside the clutch of her little hand. “Why aren’t you married?”

That catches him so off-guard he laughs, a short, huffed sound. “Steady on.”

“I’m serious,” she considers him over her cards. For such a small thing, her gaze is unerring and shrewd. “You’re not _that_ ugly. And you are s’ssessful.” She glances around his large apartment as if to prove her point.

He throws his head back and roars, startling her.

“Goodness, child.” He shakes his head.

“But aren’t you lonely?” she presses, holding her cards against her heart. Her eyes are earnest, they shine like gold under the lamp above the kitchen table.

The amusement slips off his features.

They watch each other for a long time.

“I daresay-” he considers the cards in his hand. There is the slightest tremor in the tips of his fingers as he selects one. He wills it steady as he lays it down. “Even in marriage, one can feel terribly alone.”

She turns her face towards the view port. Outside, the stars are a blur at hyperspeed. He can see her reflection in the transparisteel.

Something prickles in his heart. He doesn’t know why, but he feels as if he’s just been unforgivably cruel to her. He finds himself reaching before he can stop his hand.

She doesn’t take it, it lies between them on the table, palm facing down.

“I don’t think it matters if I'm sleeping,” she whispers.

Space streaks across the surface of her glassine eyes as they find his in the glass. “I think I’m dreaming all the time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you're enjoying yourself as much as I am : )


	5. Prussian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Uh-oh, psketti-oh!

“I ain’t doin’ it!”

She’s making a quite show of it today, hands fisted at her sides, tears of anger and of humiliation racing one another down her flushed, rounded cheeks. They drip off her chin onto her collar and streak into the neckline of her lavish gown, making the tops of her breasts glisten like stars where they heave above her tight jeweled bodice.

She bares her teeth and snarls. Her small, lilted voice echoes in the dark, cavernous hall. “I ain’t no _fuckin’_ animal, here to dance an’ sing for ‘im like a _pet whore-_ ”

“No one has said a word about singing,” where he stands before her with an empty ballroom looming at his back, he folds his hands benignly behind him.

 _“She’s an embarrassment at state dinners, and she hates my fucking guts,”_ the Sith had informed him succinctly over yet another stolen whiskey. This time, it was at four in the morning. In the General’s home. _“You teach her.”_

_Well. Here we are._

His eyes meet hers over the imperious lilt of his chin. “And I shall thank you for minding your language, Your Majesty.”

Her fury crumbles as her voice warbles then cracks, “Ahm’tage-”

“Tut-tut, none of that now. Come girl, dry your eyes,” from the breast of his regimental coat, he produces a handkerchief. His voice is not unkind.

She wipes, heedless of smudging her pretty paints, and blows her nose in a way that seems to rebound off every surface of the sleek great hall. “It’s just-”

She stutters suddenly through a long, involuntary sigh. Her slender shoulders sag, she searches his eyes as a she would a comrade’s.

As she would a friend’s.

“It’s so mortifiable, you know?” her hands twist opposite corners of his handkerchief in either direction, “It’s like, the humiliation never ends…”

“I do know,” he spares a rueful smile at their shared lot.

_I used to be a general._

“I know too that, if you refuse him, he will punish you. Cruelly,” to his own surprise, his murmur is velvet-soft. “And that… is more than I can bear.”

Her golden eyes reflect the shallow light as they study him openly, unabashedly. He’s never had a woman regard him as she does, with such frank discernment and perception.

 _Not a woman,_ he reminds himself. He finds he has to more frequently since-

“They’ll laugh at me-” she shakes her head. Her adornments ring gaily, mocking her throughout the dining hall. Her gaze is knowing, and sad. “They do already. They all think I’m stupid and ridiculous and savage- That’s why he’s doing this, can’t you see that? He wants us both to fail-”

“Then we shall prove him wrong.” The rich leather of his glove creaks softly inside the thin space between them. He cannot bear to see her beaten, in body nor in spirit. She is too precious.

Too dear.

His murmur is so soft it hardly splits the silence.

“Please.”

She hesitates, takes a low, halting breath, and lays her palm inside his hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She is not the Galaxy’s most graceful creature.

But she has her style, he’ll give her that.

“It’s not that I don’t _like_ peana buttah,” she explains huffingly, bent over one ankle crossed over her knee as she fishes beneath her long dress for her slipper. Her pale breasts tremble brightly, threatening to spill over the salacious sweep of her bodice. She clutches his bicep for balance. “It’s just that, why not have two jelly-sides, if you can?”

“Certainly, ma’am,” he stands rod-straight, his arm in her grasp holding onto his lapel, the other folded smartly behind him. His eyes are fixed determinedly on the smooth-planed ceiling high above. The only sound in the great hall apart from the ones they make are that of the metronome he’s set up in a near corner. Its bland _tock-tock_ keeps time.

“I mean, if you’re going to have anythin’ _with it_ , why not roast meat?”

“Delightful,” he mutters wryly, before risking a glance out of the corner of his eye. She looks decent in his periphery.

_Thank the stars._

“Are you quite sure you don’t need those?” he asks as she straightens with a satisfied little puff, holding her two shoes in her hand. Her dimples peek at him from within her blushed cheeks.

“What, these?” her nose crinkles. She lofts them higher, showing off their impractical heel. Without them, she appears unbelievably small. “Could you dance in them?”

He acquiesces with a snort, “Hardly.”

“ ‘xactly.” She turns and tosses them aside. They hit the polished tile with a delicate clatter that leaps from wall-to-wall and skitter away from one another, the twinkle of their many precious stones swallowed whole by the shadows.

“Right, then.” Her bare feet slap softly as she comes to stand before him. She raises her arms like a little marionette in pose. “Dance me, Ahm’tage.”

He twitches his lips and clears his throat to hide his chuckle. No good can come by encouraging her rascality, he well knows. “As you say, ma’am.”

Very gently, as if arranging strands of spun glass, he drapes her arm upon his and takes up her hand. His fingers fold delicately around hers, she is so near that his breath stirs the fine strands of hair peeking through her headdress.

She smells sweet, floral and soft.

He glances at the metronome just over her shoulder before again he meets her eyes. Hers never left his face. “Off we go, then. Half-tempo to start. Do mind your step-through this time.”

“Nat’rally,” she pipes.

In a whirl of dark fabric, they’re off.

He guides her smoothly from their opening through a round turn, pleased with her graceful follow. It is a dance he knows by heart, so often he practiced it as a boy, and his footwork is crisp and sure as he takes them through the paces. She glides in time with his lead, sinking further and further into faith as her body learns to love the motion of his own. In short time, it feels as though he’s carrying her fully on his arm and she is feather-light, a shadow made of air and sunlight. Her lips are sweetly parted, lashes flickering like the twinkle of far-off stars each time she blinks. The long skirt of her gown trails like an afterimage as they spin.

Never does she take her eyes from his.

His heartbeats crest and dissolve. Within this dark hall, he is timeless, watching his reflection move in the liquid surface of her eyes, to nothing but the sound of the metronome and her tinkling jewels and his own abating breath.

He wants to kiss her.

The desire is as violent as it is sudden, arresting his senses so that he thinks he _is_ kissing her in that moment. Her small, tender body in his embrace and his tongue within her mouth-

She stumbles through their next step, breaking his trance as she falls breathless into his arms. “Ahm’tage-”

 _She can see my thoughts,_ he remembers, eyes closing to shut out the horror. He cannot know which is worse, to have coveted the child-wife of the Sith, or for her to know it.

 _It is to lose her trust,_ he realizes.

The thought shames him more.

“Your Majesty,” he bows deeply, formally. Penitently, “Forgive me, I-”

She lurches upward and steals his apology with her lips.

Her kiss is as she is, bold and inelegant, starving and warm.

_Perfection._

Her arm winds behind his shoulder to touch his opposite cheek as his cinches around her waist, adding a soft bend to her back as he draws her flush against him.

Still, their hands are holding, so hard their knuckles bloom white.

Oh, he _loves her._

He tries to drown the realization in the sound of their kiss, so desperate and sensual it smothers the talk of the metronome. Her fingers twine inside his hair. Each moment he thinks is the one in which he’ll surface, but he only dives deeper, reaching into her with his hot, slick tongue.

He cannot breathe, he cannot breathe, he cannot he cannot he cannot-

He wrenches back gasping, “That’s enough!”

Her lips are wet and swollen, he thinks he’ll never forget the imprint of her young breasts against his chest, or the way her eyes are watching him now, devastated. Heartbroken.

He has failed her, in perhaps the only way that counts.

“My dear girl,” his voice is choked by self-loathing. He touches her hair, cups her cheek, if only to be sure he hasn’t well and truly shattered her, “I am so sorry, I am so terribly, terribly sorry-”

He is still holding her hand.

Their skin makes a hushed sound as he pulls them apart. She follows him, bleating like an abandoned lamb as she reaches, “Ahm’tage-”

“No-” Already he’s retreating for the door.

“Ahm’tage, _stay-_ ”

Every instinct is telling him to flee.

But she has asked.

So stay he does, taking her back into his arms and holding her as a father would his only precious daughter. But that delusion is now strewn into fragments across the floor.

They grin up at him with sinister leers as shadows flirt and whisper in every corner of the great room. The metronome tocks away what’s left of his life.

“I love you,” she whispers into his collar.

 _Dead man,_ the hall echoes back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Well*. Goodness. General, get your self-control together.
> 
> Kidding, don't.
> 
> Sorry guys, I wouldn't help mahself. It's *Armitage Hux*. How were we ever *not* going ballroom dance, at some point, is what I wanna know.


	6. Cobalt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do please read the tags ( :

The Sith is waiting for him.

He punches in the security code he uses for his private apartments, thinking of her as the scanner pans the surface of his eye. How frightened she looked when he finally left her, many minutes after their lesson should have ended and she returned to the Sith. The way she clutched his lapel in the empty lift bay before they parted and begged him to kiss her again.

He hadn’t.

_“Please, I want to be with you, Ahm’tage-”_

Lighting a cigarette from the case he carries, he steps into his darkened apartment and pours himself a drink. The delicate clink of crystal-on-crystal and the soft trickle of whiskey chips the silence. He thumbs his forehead and pictures her fragile, feral beauty he held within his arms as he raises his glass.

“How was she?”

 _That voice_ gravels from the section of his living room so deep in shadow the furnishings lose their shape. It is only vague, overlapping forms of darkness, layered like stagnant waves. His is the blackest among them.

The General’s throat tightens. Fear mangles him, striking his spine like a bolt of lightning and burning his chest cold as his gut plummets.

Smoothly, he drapes a curtain across his mind.

_How much has he seen?_

The Sith’s figure seems to unfold forever beneath the darkness, gathering mass as it draws upward, as a tidal wave on the horizon. He staggers mountainous into the weak, grainy light cast by the single table lamp switched on near the viewport. He has a dry tumbler in his hand.

The General tries not to flinch as he lurches, massive and favoring his bad hip, towards where he stands by the bar. Gloved hand engulfing the carafe completely, he sloshes four fingers worth into his glass.

The General wills himself not to tremble as he lifts his cigarette and takes a short, calming drag.

“By all means,” he gestures, unable to hide his disgust, “help yourself.”

The Sith snorts into his drink.

_He knows…_

The General glances but doesn’t linger at the bob of the Sith’s throat as he finishes the whiskey in three long drafts, head tipped back, mane falling past his shoulders. Even if he were to strike now, the demon would sense his intention before the blade was slipped out from of his jacket sleeve. He would die right here on the floor at his feet.

_There has got to be a way-_

“You didn’t answer my question,” the Sith’s rustful baritone breaks his homicidal reverie.

“Oh?” he feigns, taking another pull from his cigarette.

The Sith’s sneer is sloppy, his lewdly red lips are wet with whiskey, but his eyes are deadly sober as he asks, “Was she any good?”

It seems wrong that the General should burn with indignation for this man’s wife when he’s only just kissed her.

Nevertheless.

He flicks his ash into the crystal dish on the bar before answering coolly, “I take it you mean her dancing?”

The Sith’s head cocks, as a buzzard watches an animal limp alone in a field, and mock-wonders, “What else could I mean, General?”

He slips his hand in his pocket and shrugs. “I teach her any number of subjects.”

The Sith smiles. It is truly terrifying.

“So she tells me,” he says softly, reaching down the neck of his surcoat for something he’s kept concealed against his breast.

The General loathes himself for flinching.

With the gentle rustle of reed paper, the Sith lays some pale, folded note next to the General’s drink on the bar. His sneer is still there, though slightly faded, as if weighed down by the bitterness that comes through his voice.

“Open it.”

He pours himself another drink as the General stamps out his cigarette and takes the page between his two hands.

It is ice cold.

The Sith turns away with his tumbler, contemplating the blurred stars at hyperspeed outside the viewport before he knocks it back, as the General gently unfurls what he suspects is the instrument of his doom.

 _Ah. So it is,_ he realizes, as he greets the two words written over and over again in painstaking, love-worn letters across every inch of the page.

_Armitage Hux._

It is undeniably her hand.

He refolds the reed paper and closes his eyes. His blood is roaring in his ears.

“She likes you, you know,” the Sith’s voice is casual, conversational. He is standing within striking distance, the General notes with detachment. “At least she thinks she does. I can see it in her mind. She pictures you when I fuck her-”

Suddenly, there is the sharp sound of shatter that can only be glass against transparisteel. The General doesn’t startle this time. It’s as if a trap door has opened beneath his feet and he is falling down, down into darkness, with only one thought slowing his descent into deadly resignation.

_What will become of her if I am no more?_

That fear eclipses all others, launching him to open his eyes and affect his best display of abject contempt.

“Hardly,” he spits, so indignantly repulsed he nearly fools himself.

“You don’t believe me,” the Sith appears suspicious. His hands run through impatiently his mane.

_So, he does not know for certain. He's come to smoke out a rat._

_Give him a herring._

“I do believe she hates you,” the General observes the truth mildly, with brisk detachment. Then he raises his sword against his pride. “I do believe she prefers my company, as a bed-slave prefers the company of eunuchs when she is not forced to entertain. I highly doubt I stir her _passions,_ as you so inelegantly suggest. Surely because of my severe and unprepossessing countenance, and because-” here he looks directly into those dark, damned eyes and raises his chin, “truthfully, after what you have done to her, I should think that poor girl would want nothing more to do with a man so long as she lives.”

For the single span of a heartbeat, the Sith simply watches him, as if sensing for a lie. Then he snorts into a half-smile, nods once. Twice.

His fist comes so fast the General has no time to brace.

It strikes him in his solar plexus, so that the air leaves his lungs in a single searing, maddening rush a split-second before his drink follows. He vomits onto the floor.

The Sith catches him by the hair and jerks, holding him upright and bent slightly back as a hook. His neck pops warningly, he cannot catch his breath.

“For your sake, General,” the Sith wrings him in his grip, “I hope you’re right.”

He drops him gasping into a pool of whiskey and bile, pausing at the bar to polish off what’s left of the General’s tumbler and setting the reed paper on fire with the General’s lighter before he leaves.

From his hands and knees on the floor, the General watches through watering eyes the page curl into itself and wither to ash on top of the polished counter.

Its flames burnish his reflection in the viewport to gold.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next day, they are all gathered in the main hanger, the officers and command crew, as well as the fifth and ninth fleets, when the Sith drags a Stormtrooper by the soft collar of his uniform across the durasteel into the middle of the assembly.

The General recognizes him instantly as the soldier who made Rey laugh.

She follows the Sith, clutching at the beast’s other arm. Her face is crumpled in distress as she wrenches the sleeve of his surcoat. “Kylo, please- don’t do this- you don’t have to do this- Kylo, stop! _Stop-_ ”

The boy is drug up from the floor onto his feet. He is sobbing quietly, shuddering as he reels, teeth chattering, shoulders hunched. Blood pours down from his nose into his mouth.

“Kylo-” her plea ends in a keen as the Sith’s fist connects with the soldier’s heart. Its impact rings throughout the titanic hanger.

He staggers and drops to one knee, blood and spittle spraying as he gasps for breath.

“Get up,” the Sith snarls. Rage revels with the madness in his eyes. _“Get up!”_

His black glove clenches the soldier’s face like the grip of night as he hauls the boy up by the maw.

“Somebody help him!” she screams.

A few feet away, the General stands beside his Captain, who watches the scene without her helmet, her chin raised high and proud. He focuses on the quiet folding of his hands in front of him as the next blow lands with a sickening _thud_.

“What was his crime?” he asks quietly.

A disbelieving sneer twists the Captain’s ruined face as she answers, “Does it matter?”

The girl is nearly doubled-over in her bleating, hands tearing at her hair and at her clothes. Her necklace strains then bursts, its diamonds scattering out like stars at the birth of a cold, pitiless universe. A few skid into the soldier’s blood pooling from his now-unhinged jaw.

The Sith does not stop.

The General cannot bear to see her suffer. His feet find themselves moving to where she is listing in her grief towards the floor, he turns her face into his shoulder. She holds his neck and shakes so violently he afraid her bones shall break apart.

“There-there, child. Look away, my girl. Shh-shh-shh. Look away.”

The soldier now is screaming, animal and raw. The Sith roars back at him, raining blows faster and harder until there are whimpers and then nothing but the sound of the beast’s own feral breathing and dull clap of fists upon wet flesh.

She clings to him, her fingers curled inside the collar of his uniform. “Ahm’tage-”

“Shh,” he rocks her minutely, as the tide soothes the shore. His eyes never leave the Sith.

Now that it is over, he is drenched in blood. It coats his gloves and soaks his surcoat, it clings to his chin and drips off his hair. His body heaves with his panting and he trembles, his soul is sick with a fury that will not burn out.

His wife does not love him. And she never shall.

 _Yet another,_ thinks the General. He tries not to picture the last little girl, the end she met in her lavish closet, surrounded by gowns more beautiful than stars. Her trifling weight born over his shoulder as he cut her down is a feeling he will never forget.

As is this sensation, of his charge, his _lady_ , withering to nothing inside his arms, soul-sick and hopeless.

The Sith wipes off what he can with cloth the Captain hands him. But blood stains his skin red and deepens the black leather of his glove.

He reaches. “Beloved.”

She recoils deeper into the General.

The Sith’s teeth razor at the back of his mouth. He rolls his lips and bares his fury at her back. _“Rey.”_

“Forgive her, sir,” gently, the General unfurls her fingers from his collar. It is like forcing a bud to bloom. “She’s in a bit of a shock.”

The Captain snorts mirthlessly by his side.

It takes the two men to pry her off him, she screeches and thrashes and bucks. When her nails rake the air over the Sith’s face, he wraps his fist lovingly within her hair.

His soldiers stand still and watch.

“That is wholly unnecessary,” the General is _begging_ , though no one is listening. Least of all the Sith, “You are punishing her for naught-”

Out of patience, the Sith subdues her with his magics, catching her softly falling body romantically within his arms. He lifts her like a sleeping bride and tucks her against his blood-drenched chest. Their eyes meet over her body.

Hatred curls slick and seething inside the General’s gut.

“You’ve made your point, you _animal_ ,” he snarls, quaking with righteous fury.

“Clean it up,” is all the Sith says. He juts his chin at the dead little soldier.

Then his loping bootfalls are fading away as he bears the girl back to their imperial apartment, to what hells the General will spend this sleepless night imagining.

He stays until the body is dragged away, and the mess is mopped up.

What, he wonders, shall wash his sins away?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. That was exciting : >


	7. Zaffer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pastel thought she was going to write a Rux story without sexing. 
> 
> *Hilarious*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do please read the tags.

Each time they meet like this, he unravels a bit more.

“He cannot do this!” her pitch is desperate, high enough to shatter glass.

There is none here in the garage, only hot steel and solder and the sweltering work of the drones. They have been rendezvousing here since the incident in the hanger. They meet when the Sith is occupied or ravaging worlds off-ship.

The Sith put an end to their lessons weeks ago, citing with a sneer her improved dancing and more colorful, verbose insults as grounds for her graduation. So they are reduced to this - frantic, fragile moments in the last place anyone would look for them. Beneath the bridge on the repair garage floor.

A brief glance of white sparks overtakes the glower of the soldering irons reflected in her large, glassine eyes as her hands wring desperately at his dress shirt. “He can’t do this. He can’t send you away. Ahm’tage-”

He lets her take his face between her two hands, relishing their perfect fit within the hollows of his features, like that of her little body against his own. As if they were made to be this way.

Together.

“I’ll die if you go.”

He bows until their foreheads meet in gentle touch. His great coat and jacket lay abandoned on the workbench behind him, alongside his gloves. His arms are folded delicately around her, as if to hold her from falling apart. Her cheek is cupped tenderly in one bare hand, the small of her back held covetously by the other.

It could almost be pure, the way he cherishes her in his arms.

Almost.

“My darling girl,” in the absence of his kiss, his thumb strokes softly upon her lips. “You mustn’t say such things-”

Somewhere along the line, he has lost his religion. He thinks perhaps it was in her eyes.

“It breaks my heart.”

“I will,” she seethes, mouth trembling. She bares her small, white teeth, “I’ll kill myself, I swear it. I’ll die before he touches me again. I- I don’t want him to touch me. Please don’t let me touch me-”

Her voice cracks. She tips up her chin and smothers her own sob with a kiss.

He can taste her sorrow on his tongue.

How he is any different from the Sith in this way, he can no longer tell. Her tiny fingers sieve through his sweat-soaked hair, tugging him into the angle she prefers before she presses further into his mouth. His arms close around her like a steel trap as he ruts against her, his impeccable uniform shirt slides atop the generous sheen of sweat that slicks every inch of his body.

The repairs garage is totally untempered, it broils under the blasts of soldering irons and the steam rising off the ingots as new parts are smelted and poured. The heat melts the kohl at the corners of her eyes and wilts her high, elegant hairstyles to soft swathes of damp silk in his hands. It makes her naked thighs slip too around his hips when he makes love to her, his trousers pooled about his ankles, face buried at her neck above her collar, his tongue laving over the cruel welts the Sith’s fangs leave behind.

Here in the humid swelter, he is a man without principles. A man completely, recklessly in love.

With a child.

Shame cracks across his gut as she mews his name into his mouth.

“Ahm’tage-”

She is shaking, as she always is when they come together in this way. He does not delude himself it is because he is so masterful or desirous. Rather, he is the vehicle to that for which she truly yearns.

Freedom.

He does free her, from the clutch of her dark dress which pours like liquid night down her small, pale body and puddles at his feet.

She is covered in contusions.

Dark, ugly bruises from digging fingers and razoring teeth. They mottle her freckled skin from her fledgling breasts past the concave of her belly, all the way down her young, round thighs. Between her legs, her bare sex is red and swollen. She is so raw she can hardly stand to be touched.

Yet she arcs into him, her heart straining to reach him through her ribs as he bathes her in a balm of soft-lipped kisses and the shameful tears that drip from his pale lashes. He starts at the crown of her head and moves downward, cherishing her cheeks and the strong line of her jaw, to the place on her neck just above her collar. His kisses there make her cry out sweetly into the garage. He continues to love her along her slender shoulders and on the skin chaffed raw under her collar. He is on his knees when her hands in his hair guide him impatiently towords her breast.

She comes from just the gentle slip of his fingers through her slit and the sensation of her nipple worried between his soft lips.

“Ahm’tage,” she mewls, panting and pleading as his tongue skims down her belly to dip into her navel. A foreshadow of what is to come. “Ahm’tage, now…”

“Steady, my love,” he whispers against her heart.

It is the sweetest feeling in the Galaxy, her body clinging to his as he lifts and settles her carefully upon a work surface he’s cleared with the sweep of his arm. Fine flecks of metal glimmer like grains of gold where they float suspended in the air, illuminated by the blinding strikes of undulating light from the drones repairing a damaged hull.

As she did the first time he made love to her, several weeks ago, and in all his vile imaginings before that, her parts her slender thighs to him. Her folds are glistening wet.

 _“He can’t tell,”_ she whispered in his ear the third time it happened, with her fist clenched in his shockingly disheveled hair and her thighs quaking all around him. _“When I picture this, when he_ takes me _, he can’t tell if it’s real-”_ her voice cracked around a cruel, tear-studded smile, _“Stupid fucking Sith.”_

 _He is not the only fool,_ the General thinks wryly, as his tongue bullies tenderly her small pearl around its nest.

She clutches him between her thighs slung over his shoulders and holds his mane tightly inside her desperate grip, as a rider holds the reins of a stallion she fears will bolt. Their sweat mingles and runs in thick rivulets down his neck. He is soaked in her scent and her glistening slick that coats his two fingers to the knuckle as they piston inside her, stoking her pleasure, wringing a second crest after her first, and then a third. He could stay like this forever, worshiping her until his lungs give out and he chokes on his own weak character and folly.

No, he is no better than the Sith.

“Don-don’t think that, Ahm’tage-” above him, she gasps and trembles, her hand not in his hair braced behind her, little belly quivering with the aftershocks of her lastest orgasm. Her face is streaked with kohl and tears and sweat. Her marked breasts, not even a whole handful put together, glisten like dew-drenched rosebuds.

She is a vision amongst the wreckage.

A sudden burst of nearby sparks reflects on surface of her body, her sweat mirrors its dappled light so that she appears to be made of glass. The fear that she is and that she will shatter grips him so violently he surges up from the floor to shelter her with his own fully-dressed form.

She drags his mouth to hers, drawing the taste of herself from his lips between breathless, forceful, warbling admonishments. “You are _not_ like him, you’re not. How can you think that when you’re not?”

He holds her hips and lays his head on her shoulder, watching passively yet with breath abating as her shaking hands work him free from his slacks.

“I _love_ you, Ahm’tage-” she croaks.

His gut churns, a sickening amalgam of shame and rage and yearning at the sight of his girth in her childish grasp.

There will be no forgiveness for him when his time comes. If God is just, there will not.

“You do not know what you love,” he whispers, pressing a soft kiss of contrition to her jutting clavicle. The long span of his hand eclipses her collar.

He will not look at it when he fucks her.

Her head tips back with the press of his thumb beneath her chin. He seals his lips over the sweet, sacred spot above her bobbing throat as his cock parts her folds.

He times his thrust so that he hilts himself inside her just as the grinding whirr of a drill drowns her keening wail.

He fucks her deeply, steadily, for an eternity, back curving and glutes flexing and quads burning to reach the part of her he needs to heal. She is lush and sopping, coming often on his cock, her hot little cunny gulping greedily at his length to draw him deeper against her soft, dark womb.

She is so, so small.

He looks directly into her eyes as he moves, almost without blinking, mouth open and soul trembling, as he bathes her face in his soft, panting breaths. Between the erratic bursts of machine sounds, he hears her hitched, staccato breathing and the wet squelch her sex makes each time he returns.

He loses count of how many times she comes.

“My precious angel,” he calls her, “my darling girl. My sweet, sweet love. How perfect you are, how good. That’s it, there you are. Come to me, my angel. Come to me again-”

His hand not holding her head tipped back finds where she’s parted around his breadth. With tender precision, he works her pleasure still higher, until she’s shuddering on his shaft, a babbling, sobbing, straining mess, all the muscles in her belly and the tendons in her neck stretched achingly taut. Until her slick pools the table and trickles down his thighs. Until she forgets how to speak, how to see, how to breathe.

Until she forgets she wants to die.

“Please, Ahm’tage,” she whimpers so sweetly.

So sweetly…

His breath gutters out like a candle inside his strangling lungs, his tears patter her face as the first drops of rain upon parched earth.

“You… will live… if it’s the last… bloody thing… I ever… love… my love-” his voice catches. He presses their mouths together and comes with a groan.

His love overflows her, washing her pure white.

 

 

 

 

 

Afterwards, she lies in his arms with her head on his heart. The tip of her little thumb strums along the line of his chest as his fingertips skim softly down her spine. Besides her collar, they are both completely bare.

“Where is he sending you?” her voice sounds childish and fragile in the silence.

The droids have paused their work, allowing their welding to cool before they test its strength. The only light in the garage now is the slow-fading glower of the scars that crisscross the hull.

He closes his eyes and imagines the light is from a small campfire. He pictures the dome of night arcing over them, cool and clear. An endless litany of stars. “The Celucean System, to start.”

Where the riots are the worst.

He feels rather than sees her turn and prop her chin on the back of her hand. “Is it dangerous?”

_Undoubtedly._

“Not at all.” Without opening his eyes, he flicks ash off the end of his cigarette he holds extended away from her. He is still picturing them free beneath the stars. “It’s routine, rather.”

“Do you want to go?” she whimpers.

He opens his eyes. Back inside the desolate garage, his hand cards cherishingly through her hair. “Quite the opposite, I assure you.”

She watches him for a long time, her large, golden eyes lit strangely by the glow.

He takes a long drag from his cigarette, listening to its end sizzle against the lull.

“Do you wish we never started?” her words are hardly a whisper this time.

He sighs.

It’s a simulation he often runs, on the nights she’s with the Sith and he cannot sleep for his own twisted imagination. He lies awake in bed with cigarette in hand and stares out through his viewport at the blur of stars while his mind walks further and further back in time, erasing his follies one-by-one. Always, they lead him like a trail of scavenged, scattered corpses to their inevitable genesis - the very moment he was born.

A maudlin exercise, to be sure.

And yet, no matter how hard he strives to, he can never make falling in love with her one of his regrets.

Perhaps because he has no character left at all.

“What I wish, my lady,” he says now, tucking his cigarette between his lips before he reaches for the small flask of bacta he keeps hidden in his breast pocket for when they meet, “is that I’d brought more salve. Turn over,” he tells her gently.

She lies down on his uniform coat and obediently parts her thighs.

The unguent is cool and slightly stinging to the touch. He paints her bruises first, kneeling between her smooth, slender legs, before he slathers her raw little sex in a generous layer and slips two slick fingers inside her. Patiently, he works the salve into her cervix then dips back in several times to coat her walls.

She lies still and watches from beneath her lashes, whimpering whenever he kneads a spot that’s especially tender. When he’s finished, she sits up and winds her slight arms about his neck.

He does not deserve her gratitude, but she lavishes it anyway, pecking soft kisses to his lips and to his lashes and to the hollows of his cheeks.

He holds his cigarette away from her so that she does not inhale the smoke and lets his cool blue eyes study her through the dim, flickering light.

“Promise me you’ll eat today,” he murmurs, as the tips of his fingers trace the obvious indent of her ribs.

“Why?” her voice trembles, “What’s the point, even? You’re leavin’. Probably you won’t come back-”

She stems a sob against her shoulder. When he strokes the hair back from her eyes, she shakes her head and shrugs.

He begins, “Because you say you love me-” she swells with a rebuttal, but he tut-tuts her with a finger to her lips, “and because I cannot sustain myself if I must watch you wither away. If my lady will not eat-”

The tips of his fingers trail down her arm to her hand lying limp in her lap, “then my body shall starve also. If my lady will not drink, then I shall choke on my own thirst-” lacing their fingers together, he looks into her eyes, “If my lady should ever harm herself, then my heart shall cease to beat.”

His throat is thick with devastating emotion. It makes his voice tremor like distant thunder as he forces himself to finish, to make her comprehend, “My lungs shall cease to breathe, my eyes shall cease see. I shall hear nothing but the sound of my own grieving. Then I shall lie down and be no more. For what is a sky without its sun? What is a galaxy without stars?”

_Nothing._

“Without you, I am truly lost.”

All at once, she is clamoring within his arms. “No, don’t say that, Never never say that-”

“I must, because it is the truth.” He kisses her crown as he rocks her through her weeping, “Hold on, my love. My darling. I will come back to you, I swear it. But you must, you _must_ hold on.”

_You must._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is a ceremonial sendoff. As is appropriate for his rank and title.

He is joined by Captain Phasma, they walk side-by-side through the ranks of their fleet. Their soldiers are in full battle armor, gleaming crystal-white beneath the titanic banners of the Imperial insignia hung throughout the massive hanger. He is dressed in his formal regimentals, she in her customary chrome and crimson caplet. It is the sort of grand circus at which he used to swell with self-important pride.

 _Such juvenile folly_.

She is waiting at the end of the line to receive him. Draped in lurid swaths of scarlet so sheer he can see every detail of her body beneath it, with dark crystals hung throughout her hair trembling like droplets of blood. Her painted lip quivers. Each time she blinks, black kohl streaks faintly down her rouged cheeks and falls to her heavy collar.

The Sith smirks at him from her side.

The General draws a curtain over the images playing on the backs of his eyes. Of the Sith writhing in a pool of his own filth on the floor. Of his guts scattered out amongst the stars.

The sharp echoes of his bootfalls fade abruptly as he halts to attention at the end of the line. His wrath shows in the subtle flare of his nostrils as he exhales and in the high, furious lilt of his chin.   

“Supreme Leader,” he raises his fist to his breast in salute. The gauntness in his face flexes with the gnash of his teeth behind clenched lips.

Then his eyes soften, exponentially, as he turns. “Your Majesty.”

Her shoulders judder. She turns away into the back of her hand.

The Sith ignores her, clapping his Captain boldly on her shoulder before he turns his gloating sneer on the General like the beam of a laser.

“General Hux,” his terrible smile twists his scar. “May the Force be with you.”

The General snorts.

Beside the Sith, his lady continues to grieve silently. Her shaking is so violent that her jewels clatter like cruel chatter amongst her elegant hairstyle.

“Beloved,” the beast calls her, mockingly soft, “aren’t you going to tell him goodbye?”

Behind his back, the General’s fingers twitch for the blade he keeps in his sleeve. He closes his fist and begs her quietly instead, “Be well, my lady.”

_My love._

Then he is off, striding across the tarmac with the Captain at his side. Time seems to unwind around him, he moves as if through water. They are but grains of sand suspended between halves of an hourglass, he realizes.

With every step he takes from her, his heart slips further away.

“Ahm’tage!” her sudden, broken bleating from behind him lances through his heart.

A wave of astonishment ripples through their soldiers. He hears the scuffling sounds of a struggle, hands slapping and fabric rending as she claws back at the Sith.

“No, let me go- let me go! I hate you! _I hate you_ -”

“Ridiculous,” scoffs Phasma. “She is so entitled.”

He clears his throat, blinking rapidly against the prick as his feet find the ramp. His legs shake. He cannot breathe for fury.

“Quite.”

The last thing he sees through the closing hatch is her fainting into the arms of the Sith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am enjoying creating this so, so much. It's one of my favorite pieces I have ever done.
> 
> Only three more chapters : )


	8. Pale

The Galaxy is nothing but death and ash.

For seven long cycles, his campaigns take him away from her, across vast systems and divergent worlds. The scenes are always the same.

Violence. Carnage and fire. Decay.

He sluices like a cancer through a universe torn apart by the vanity of power and the hubris of absolutism. He hates himself more and more each day.

For is this not the fierce machine which he has built?

Death, that is his legacy. Not the total, perhaps. No, there is some sliver which might still be written, if he moves faster than time.

And then, there is the little girl he loves.

Loved.

Loves.

Yes, there is certainly that.

“Sir,” his lieutenant salutes him crisply, but he sees how badly the boy’s hand shakes inside his glove. “The rioters have breached the barricade. The tower is no longer safe.”

“Let them come,” snarls the Captain. Her chrome gleams under the white, sterile lights of the command tower’s first deck. “They want to play soldiers? We’ll give them a soldier’s death.”

Standing at the large panning window staring out at the smolder and ravage, the General sneers.

“They’re not revolutionists.”

He looks down upon the swarming masses clambering desperately over their barricades to pound on their doors. They are widows with their hungry children and the aged and the sick. They are the orphaned and the poor.

They are little desert girls in silk rags and jeweled collars.

Their tiny hands strain up to reach him. He imagines leaning down.

“They are starving. Hunger makes them desperate and rabid. Their children and their elderly are languishing in the streets. Give them food and water, and watch their ideals die on a full belly and an empty plate.”

He turns and addresses the lieutenant. “Go to the store lockers and take down what rations we have to them. Have the guard follow you with the medkits and enough portable filtration units to clarify a thousand gallons of water to consumption-standard. That should tide them over until we can summon supply ships from the nearest Base-”

“Are you mad?” the Captain spits. Her animus roils through the modulator in her helmet, “ _Feed them_ , that’s your answer to anarchy? _Give them food and clean water_. You are speaking _treason_ ,” she snarls.

The General folds his gloved hands benignly behind his back. His eyebrow arches at the lieutenant. “Yes, I believe the Captain is finished now. You may go, Mitaka.”

“ _Don’t you dare,”_ the Captain’s quicksilver battle rod is expanded, she holds it out at her side to bar the lieutenant’s path. But her visor is angled at the General as she growls, “Don’t listen to this fool. He is _besotted_ with the mewings of a prejudiced little girl-”

“Careful, Captain,” the General drawls calmly as he steps away from the window and the muted din of desperation from the subjects below, and up onto the dais where she heaves snorting with rage.

His hands never leave their loose clasp behind his back. “You are sailing perilously close to mutiny. I will not abide insurrection.”

He stops when they are less than a meter apart.

“You presume to command my army, when it is _your_ judgement that is clouded by false promises of grandeur made by a madman with a child’s understanding of rulership and war.”

The lieutenant’s breath catches and the Captain seethes, but the General only steps closer.

“What you call treason is the most basic act of logic. Tell me, Phasma, how it is you intend to subdue an Empire which has no more subjects because they have all perished from starvation and disease. What commodities will you collect as tax when our worlds have turned to nothing but ash and rot? Do you wish to rule forever over a mass grave? Because I do not.”

He raises his chin.

“Put down your weapon now, Captain, or I shall throw you in the barracks myself for insubordination. And before you make your decision, let me remind you-” his voice drops to a menacing murmur, the likes of which neither of them has heard him use since before the Sith rose to power.

_Rabid cur, indeed._

He feels something rising in him now, reckless and unbridled, righteous and pure-bright. In this moment, his soul swells beyond him, encompassing the multitude of suffering down below, and across all the systems and worlds he has seen in these last few cycles. Perhaps because the longing to see her one last time has deranged him.

More likely, it is that her corruption, the seed which her gentle love sowed down inside of him, is coming to fruition, spanning out its wickening branches to reach for what is right.

He flatters himself that if she could see him now, she would be proud.

“We are a long way from Base One. Several cycles at hyperspeed, by my approximation. So many terrible mistakes can happen to prisoners in much shorter lengths of time. I could come into your cell and break your neck, for example. It would take me ten minutes. Less, if you are asleep.”

The lieutenant makes a choking sound.

For a long time, the Captain searches him closely through her visor. Seeking cracks in his resolve.

But he has done his mourning for himself and what might have been. Alone at night in his quarters, when he lies wretched and sleepless on dark sheets and closes his eyes and thinks of _her_. Her laughter. Her beauty. The childish changes in her whims. How she would lay her head on his shoulder as she grew tired. Her taste, upon his tongue.

He has reviewed these moments in detail, treasured them and put them away in a cedar-lined drawer that they may be buried with him when his time comes.

For now, he must do what is _right_. It is his only chance at forgiveness. Hers. His mothers.

His own.

“Help me,” he wills the Captain with the steadfastness of his own resolve, “to finish what _we_ started. A _new_ Order, Phasma.”

Tentatively, she withdraws.

“If your plan fails, General-” she begins.

“If my plan fails,” he speaks over her with sureness. There is a sinister, self-deprecating crease to the corner of his eyes, a sardonic humor she cannot begin to fathom the depth of. For he speaks not only of _this_ plan, “you shall be the one to lop off my head. Of that, I have no doubt.”

She nods, satisfied.

He barks, “Lieutenant.”

The boy snaps to attention. “Sir!”

“We’ve dithered enough, have we not? Come, I shall go down with you to distribute supplies.”

“Sir, that is not necessary-”

“Oh?” The General cannot hide his amusement. Perhaps it is because his days are numbered. He wants to smile while he still can. “You decide what is necessary now?”

“Sir, no sir!”

“Very well, then. Come along.”

 

 

 

 

 

The first step into the grey, fettered light is somewhat blinding. It stretches his pupils, long unaccustomed to the sun.

The civilians rush him, clambering over themselves to reach the rations he carries in an empty file box he found within the archives.

Behind him, more soldiers bring pallets and file boxes full of food and water and medicine, standard-issue sleep attire still in its vacuum seal, filtration units, instant-shelters, cooking utensils and other essential supplies.

“Orderly, orderly,” he calls them calmly back to dignity, “make lines. There is enough to go around once. More is on its way. That’s it, one at a time.”

Every hand that reaches in belongs to her.

 

 

 

 

 

The riots end before the week is out.

But it still takes two more full cycles of Galactic peace before the Sith calls them back. Not to _The Finalizer_. The Sith has decided to leave the stars and make his Imperial home at Base One, a planet within a system that is several cycles away.

At the small kitchen table in his quarters, he sits down and counts the months in total he’ll have been away.

Thirteen.

Lighting a cigarette, he leans back in his chair with his arm draped over the back and blows smoke up at the light.

Surely, she will forget that she loved him. Perhaps she might even have found a new-

He stubs out that thought with the ash and goes to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the twelfth cycle, she leaves a communique on his private machine.

It is a holocomm, heavily encrypted. It takes him hours to decipher it. His hands shake when he finally does.

_“Ahm’tage-”_

Instantly, he sees she has been weeping.

Her blue form is kneeling on the floor. She is in his old quarters, he realizes. Hiding in his rooms even after he is gone. The thought is so tender, so devastating, he reels, missing some of what she says. He rewinds.

 _“I’ve tri-hi-hide to re- re- recor-ho-hord,”_ she is hiccupping so hard she cannot breathe.

He has to sit down.

_“So many ti-hi-himes. But I can’t- stop cry-”_

Her head tucks down against her lap, she hugs herself into a little ball and rocks.

_Oh my darling._

He watches her for the full sixteen minutes and thirty-six second-length with his heart in his throat. When it’s over, he rewinds it and plays it again. And again. And again.

 

 

 

Hours later, he stands in the shower with his arm braced against the glass and weeps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is winter when they land on Base One.

Covered in dense, skeletal forests and oceans frozen solid to their depths, Base One is a barren world, the only one in its system. It spins slowly, in ever-widening ellipses as it slips through the grasp of a single, dying star.

He supervises the unloading of transports from the mothership that proceed the Sith and his bride. Standing in his great coat and regimental cap, his hands inside his leather gloves folded behind his back, his breath pours like smoke through the cold that stings his eyes and dries out his mouth. Snow falls in fast sheets through the slanted gaze of the tower lights, beyond which the shadows of warped, weathered trees strain their bare branches to lay hands upon the thick, feathered night.

There are no stars.

“Have you seen it yet?” the Captain’s voice jolts him from his memories. Despite her heavy armor, her footsteps fall silently through the drifts as she comes to stand by his side. Where his dark uniform absorbs what little glow the flood lights cast in their direction, her chrome reflects it. She flashes as cold and brilliant as a star.

“Seen what?” he asks, as another caravan passes, bracketed at either end by troopers marching quickly through the snow.

“The Armada,” _what else,_ her tone says. Gone is her vexation with him. With a Galaxy subdued, she has returned to her ravening interests. Conquests. New worlds against which to test her strength.

He envies her simplicity sometimes. But then again, they were once very much alike.

“It’s glorious. Ten thousand ships ready to leave this galaxy. We’ll mount the universe,” her revel is audible even through her modulator.

“Or destroy it,” he observes, following the snowfall through the shafts of eerie light. Its wedges are thick and feathered at the edges, like the ash from the worlds the Sith consumed with his chaos.

“Not anymore, if we maintain a balance as we do here.”

“A balance, goodness. Are you really Captain Phasma of the ninth?” he casts her a sidelong glance and a slanted smirk. Then his expression darkens. “Do not use that world with him. He’ll think you taken up with Jedi mystics.”

“Surely, he won’t deplete the new worlds the way he did the old ones-”

 _The old ones._ As if the vast systems and stars are toys to be grown tired of and retire.

He wonders what intensity of cruelty breeds such lack of perception. Though he might have thought the same before-

“You want her.”

The sudden, direct accusation drifts quietly with the snow.

“Why my dear Captain. You’ve ambushed me,” he remarks mildly, looking back into the flood light.

She snorts. “You should have been watching your six.”

“Ah. I was not anticipating friendly fire.”

“You know I have no friends.”

They lapse into a long-drawn silence. Behind his back, the tips of his gloved fingers rub together. The cold bites bitterly at his skin.

Her visor tilts wonderingly at the falling snow.

At last, he surrenders. “I love her.”

In his mind, he sees in silent moving pictures the way she looked as he left her behind on the tarmac. Her beauty collared and wrapped in violent red.

“It is not the same thing.”

She sighs. “I don’t think it matters, either way. He has decided not to keep her.”

Her words slip softly through his ribs to puncture his lungs so that he cannot draw a breath for fear of rasping. He strangles in silence as the soldiers and their vehicles march on.

The pound of their boots against the snow matches the dull, ringing beat inside his ears.

Another caravan passes, one the Captain wishes to follow. She steps out over the shallow bank into the road, then turns halfway.

“She is barren, Armitage.” There are no malice or gloating in her tone. Only finality. “You know he never keeps a lame mare.”

“Doesn’t he? I hadn’t noticed,” there is venom in his voice, but it is cheated by his breathless, dying heart.

“It is a pity,” she shakes her visor at the bruised, pregnant sky before she begins her march. “You know how attached he gets to them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, here we go!


	9. Indigo

It is dawn when the Sith arrives on Base One.

There is no lightening of the horizon that the General can see, it is obscured by the bare, crowded bodies of the forest trees and winter’s perennial cloak. Rather, he observes the rise of the dying star as a paling of the velvet arc of night. Black fades to indigo. Indigo to silvering white.

It is bitterly beautiful.

He waits beside the Captain on the receiving line, wearing his ceremonial regalia. Snow collects softly on his shoulders and on the smart brim of his uniform cap. The breath pours from his nose like smoke.

His eyes stay fastened on the sky.

“General,” Lieutenant Mitaka stops at attention in front of him and salutes with his fist against his breast.

Above him, beyond the slow-roving shafts of the tower lights and the bleak branches of the trees begging warmth from a pitiless sky, a light winks into existence. Though his countenance remains unmoved, the General's heart leaps to life, bounding to his ribs to stare starving between their gaps.

It is her ship.

“- soldering iron on android nine is missing-”

“Not now, Lieutenant,” his soul is racing upwards to meet her. Despite the ravening bite of winter, his blood rushes hot, suffusing him in warmth.

“But sir, the maintenance supply log says-”

“Send the droid to repairs,” snow whipped off the tarmac by the approaching turbines pelts them both in fast-melting flecks of snow. His hands clench, excitement rising to fever-pitch as he snarls, “Damnit, _now._ ”

“Sir, yes sir!”

He cannot breathe as her Imperial shuttle folds its trapezoidal wings and sets down.

“He’d better not be in one of his _melancholic fits_ ,” the Captain seethes idly as the ramp descends, “we’ve had enough delay as…”

Her voice fades out beneath the roar of his blood as within the maw of the ship, his lady appears.

_Rey._

If the Sith no longer loves her, her keeping does not show it. He’s draped her in dark red and wrapped her in furs for the occasion, had her hair styled elegantly high into a headdress dripping in blood-colored crystal strands and tear-shaped gems.

The Sith himself stands next to her in his customary surcoat and black raiment. A thick mantle of black feathers ripples along his shoulders in time with the slowing of the ship's turbines. His face is solemn, winter-white.

He escorts her down the ramp.

Her collar blips quietly in the silence that surrounds their descent. As they walk slowly down the receiving line, the General notices how it hangs much more loosely around her neck than he remembers. At second glance, lightning strikes his heart and cleaves it in half.

She is skeletal thin.

Rage at the Sith and at himself churns burning throughout his body, cauterizing the flaying ends of his self-control. Behind his back, his fists clench, the knife he keeps constantly concealed in his sleeve bites its blunt end into his wrist.

He bows coolly as she approaches, “My lady.”

“General,” she will not look him in the eye. Her skin is sallow and chapped, she looks wretched beneath her creams and paints.

Images fall past him, ephemeral and feather-light. Of her rosy and smiling up at him from the floor of his apartment. Of her laughing as they danced to the metronome. Of her laying naked in his arms and sighing as they watched the white welding-sparks fall like showers of shooting stars, casting wishes upon their false light.

_Am I too late?_

The Sith is speaking to his Captain about securing rations for troops stationed inside the Core. The General seizes his moment, angling his chin up towards the sky.

“It is quite cold,” he offers his lady his arm. The Sith glances from the corner of his eye but says nothing. “Your Majesty. May I escort you inside?”

She hesitates, wondering blankly at the gesture as if she cannot comprehend its meaning.

Until the Sith bids her quietly, “Go.”

She moves as if mechanized. As if pulled along by a set of strings.

“Thank you, General,” she says it blandly to the forest beyond them. Her sightless eyes stare dreamily at their naked, twisted limbs as they walk. Slow, mincing steps, as if the weight of her collar and adornments is too much to bear. Her fingers folded lightly over his arm are like strands of spun glass, so fragile-looking he fears they will crack just from the cold.

She does not look at him as they walk.

He wants to speak to her, to say all that he has longed to since they were parted, but his chest is too tight. A tempest roils inside his lungs, a raging amalgam of grief and love and anger where his breath should be.

“Come to my quarters tonight," he speaks finally as they meet the entrance that leads to the main corridor.

In the distance, the Sith is watching, black feathers flickering in the wind, licking at his face. His eyes are sinisterly dark.

His lady looks over her shoulder in slow-motion, up at the soft-falling snow.

Fear grips him, that his girl is completely gone.

“Rey-”

She closes her eyes. “Just one time, Ahm'tage, I want us both see the sun.”

"Come to me tonight, Rey," he holds her arm, "say that you understand."

She slips through his grasp with a phantom smile. "Thass always what you say. When I'm dreaming."

Her furs and the long trial of her gown make a soft hush against the corrugated durasteel as she floats away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That evening inside his chambers, dressed still in his regalia, he rolls a cigarette and pours a drink at the bar. Music, wordless and peaceful, sifts through the speaker inside the kitchen and soaks his apartment in gentle sound. A piece his mother was very fond of, she would hum its tune as she laid him down to sleep. He played it to her on the day that she died.

He played it once for Rey, too, before they made love.

He closes his eyes and lets the notes dissolve his soul, carrying it up through the ceiling and beyond the base, out into the starless night. His body is weightless, hollow. Made only of light. In his mind’s eye, he sees them. His women. Mother and lover.

They are whole.

He drifts that way, in and out of time, trying to un-see the scene today on the tarmac while his cigarette sizzles forgotten between his gloved fingers, until the pneumatic doors to his chamber part quietly.

Briefly, his heart stops.

He stoops down against the white sunlight and lifts a little girl-child from the sand. He sets her on his hip, and opens his eyes.

“You came," he says.

“Not exactly,” the voice of the Sith is mocking and raw.

He turns.

The beast is dressed in battle armor, saber at his side. He fills the doorway, absorbing all light. His dark, dead eyes glint like a serpent’s seeking the telltale scurry of terrified vermin from its crevice in the rock.  

But dead men do not fear the reaper.

Through the warm, still shadows, cool blue meets malevolent dark.

“On the contrary. I’ve been waiting for you,” the General crosses his fist and bows.

The Sith sneers. “I’m flattered.”

“I’d offer you a drink-” the General gestures to the lonely glass on the empty bar. “But I’m afraid this is the last of my stock.”

A skeletal smirk wrenches the Sith’s scar.

“We’ll share,” he pushes off the doorframe and lumbers towards him, stopping only when he knows his strike will reach. With another twisted smile, he lifts the tumbler, adding before his lips touch the rim, “Since we’re so good at it.”

He tips it back and drains it in a single, wet gulp.

The General takes a long, calm drag from his cigarette and watches with gleaming eyes the bob of the Sith’s throat.

“You mean because I’ve known your wife. Intimately,” he clarifies with another gesture, as the Sith tosses the glass back onto the bar.

It clatters, rattling as it spins in place until finally it sets down.

“Yes.” The Sith wipes his mouth with his armguard. He looms so close the General can feel the evil roiling off his mass. A coldness, like ether. Murder dances with the ghosts inside his eyes.

Through the speakers, a stringed instrument draws and holds its melancholy note. His leather creaks as he starts to raise his fist.

The General smiles, showing all his wicked teeth.

“You believe if you kill me now, she will destroy herself in her grief. And spare you the burden of doing it yourself. Coward," he spits, still smiling.

The Sith’s animus warbles. He winces, then snarls, “I _believed_ – if she loved you, she’d do what I told her to-”

He steps away suddenly, turning to the room at large, and hacks as his hands wring his throat.

The General draws on his cigarette.

“You- you don’t know what it’s like- to be chosen, to be _the one_ -” the Sith strangles, ravening, drooling. Confused. His stance wavers, he stumbles right. "I am- I- am-"

“You are...?” The General stubs his cigarette into the crystal ashtray on the bar top. His hands fold benignly behind his back.

“You- fucking little _rat-_ ” the Sith reaches, but fails and falls. On his knee, he braces his hand and strains upward.

But he cannot stand. His breath rasps sickeningly. “What did y-”

He chokes.

Calmly, the General bends and unclasps his saber from his belt. The Sith’s eyes follow him, large and frightened and wet, as he straightens.

“Sulfuric acid,” he explains mildly. He hides the sword behind his back beneath his coat and straightens his gloves. “The slaves on Jakku use it to clean their salvage. Highly corrosive. It burns the tips of their fingers off.”

Eyes ever-widening, the Sith lists gasping and strangling onto his side. His face trembles, ashen and slick with sweat. He lifts his hand to make a choking motion then rasps violently and sprays blood across the carpet.

The General leans down again to whisper near his ear. “She showed me the scars once, when she lay naked in my arms inside your garage. I kissed her fingertips, one by one. Then I kissed her cunt.”

Snarling, blood running between his teeth and down his chin, the Sith tries blindly to swipe at him. A convulsion overtakes him, his head tips back, eyes rolling as he gargles through a spasm.

“Wait here,” the General tells him.

He steps over him on his way to the door.

 

 

 

 

 

He finds her sitting on a bed the breadth of his entire bedroom, turned away from him, towards the wall. Her dark silk robe hangs sullenly off her shoulders, pooling around her waist. He can count the nodes in her spine.

She is trembling.

“Did you do it?” she asks. Her voice is raw from weeping, steeped in hate.

“I did.”

She turns so fast it whips his heart.

“Ahm’tage,” she gapes, clutching the bedding. Her breath catches on a sob.

“Shh,” he lifts a finger to his lips. “None of that now, cherished. I have a gift for you.”

His leather creaks as he offers out his hand.

“Come and see.”

 She warbles up to her feet, uncaring how the silk slips down her body, baring to him her breasts.

He flinches at the plain sight of her ribs.

“Ahm’tage,” she reaches shaking, hardly able to walk for her shock. He catches her before she falls, folding her carefully into his arms. She clings so hard to his uniform coat her knuckles whiten and crack.

Her frailty makes him afraid to breathe, afraid if he strains his fragile, grieving heart, it shall shatter.

He kisses her, uncaring if it smears his lips with her paints. He wills her to sap his strength.

_There is still one way to save her._

“Come away with me, my angel,” he lays their foreheads together. She grips his arms. Closes her eyes. “Come with me.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She stands wonderingly over the Sith's contorted body. Her head cocks, she stares unblinking at his greyed, wretched face.

“Rey,” he whispers. His lips are wet with yellow bile mixed with blood.

“Does it hurt?” she asks, leaning closer.

“It’s burned him from the inside out.” The General watches where he’s leaning back against the bar with the rest of his cigarette rekindled between his fingers. Revenge is a such tender moment, most especially for the uninitiated.

He does not wish to intrude.

“R-Rey-”

Where she is bent over, robe hanging off her skeletal body, exposing most of her, she turns her head.

Their eyes meet through the low, intimate light.

"I want a knife."

He draws the pen-blade he keeps in his sleeve as the Sith gargles and shudders.

She kneels down in his blood.

At first her thrusts are slow, deliberate. She takes her time slipping the blade into his stomach and between his ribs. Each time she hilts, she bears down on the contact point, teeth bared and arm trembling, until he groans or wheezes. Eventually, her strikes come faster, building in speed and ferocity, until she holds the knife in her clenched, blood-soaked fist and stabs tearing at his flesh.

“Do you like that, _beloved,”_ she mocks him in a hiss.

She is drenched when it is done.

Her head tips back, lashes flickering at the ceiling as her eyes move behind their closed lids. She sighs and lifts her arms, lets her fingers fall gently back to her face. She touches her cheeks, her lips, her collar.

She laughs, a feral, broken sound.

He leaves the rest of his cigarette to burn itself out in the ashtray and kneels behind her. His arms wind around her, he rests his chin over her shoulder and presses his lips to her temple.

He shushes her and rocks while she weeps.

“It’s time to go, little one,” he whispers into her hair when she’s finally wound down to shuddering, stuttering sighs. He draws her slowly to her feet.

 

 

 

 

They are halfway to the auxiliary hanger when the alarms begin to sound.

 

 

 

He slays two trooper-guards with his rapier who try to stop them at the firewall.

The third he shoots between the eyes with his blaster, the fourth he runs through with his blade as they round the final corner to the hanger. He has to drag aside the body for the firewall to close.

He wagers he has ten minutes before their lasers chew through the locks.

They make a strange pair inside the large sterile launch bay of the hanger, he with his bright hair hanging down in his eyes as he enters override protocols into the control terminal, she leaning with her arms crossed against the crystal hatch of an escape cradle, draped in black silk, skin smeared in blood.

He bends her carefully over the cradle and braces her with his arm across her back to sear off her collar with the small soldering gun he unbolted from a repair drone in the garage. He clenches his teeth so that his hand does not shake as sweat trembles off the tip of his nose. He does not burn her too badly.

There is healing unguent hidden away inside the cradle, he shows her, alongside clean clothes and rations and weapons and compact power sources great enough to run a small colony. There is a medical kit, filtration systems, materials to make shelter. He has removed the cradle’s tracers and its microwave transmitters.

He has thought of everything.

He’s had thirteen months to plan.

“You’re not coming,” she accuses, breathless. Her wide, frightened, glassine eyes reflect the cool-toned light.

It is almost too painful to look at her against the bright-white backdrop.

He steps into her, careful of his boots near her bare feet, and takes her face in his hands. His breath shakes.

This is the last time he’ll ever see her.

“Of course I am,” he thumbs her cheeks, “I’m right behind you.”

“Liar,” her voice cracks. She fists her hands in his coat, “You promised we’d be together-”

“We will be,” he whispers. He lays their foreheads together, closes his eyes. With crystalline clarity, his mind projects to her all the futures he’s imagined. Of the two of them together, in love and achingly happy. Making love under the open stars. Laughing together. Kissing hands.

Two small, soft hands that fit together inside her palm.

“We will be together,” his lips trembles, “and I shall love you all my life. Until you lay my body down-”

“Ahm’tage-”

“We will have children, beautiful, shining children,” he strokes her hair, holds her tighter, as time slips through his grasp, “we will watch them grow.”

She wrings her arms around his shoulders, buries her face into his neck to smother her sobs.

“Can you see it, my darling?” distantly, he hears the churn of the lasers burning through the firewall. He holds her and sways, still picturing the life he’ll never live against the backs of his closed eyes. “Can you see it all?”

She nods into his collar.

“That’s my girl.”

Very gently, he pries to lay her in the open cradle. It seals itself with a hissing stream of sterile vapor.

Her palm presses up against the glass.

He lines up their fingers, lets his tears patter the control panel as he types in the coordinates for an empty, habitable world. One drenched in sunlight.

The bay opens to the stars.

She is asleep before the launch begins, juddering sweetly inside the cradle as it leaps forward and rends the air, tearing out into space with a fearsome roar.

He does not watch it go. Already, the main lock has been bored through by the lasers. At any moment, the secondary mechanism will go.

Quickly, though his hand is quaking, he enters the schema for a system at the other end of the Galaxy. Then he lays her collar, with its transmitter blinking green, into the open cradle and steps back from its closing hatch.

 

 

 

 

He finishes his hard encryption of the launch data just as the elite guard burst through the firewall.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, Pastel. That was absurd.


	10. Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For my husband.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I waffled about what kind of ending to give this story. Then I saw the teaser, and I knew what I had to do. Whether or not it fits thematically with the rest of this work is a different story.
> 
> Please be kind, is essentially what I'm saying.

Along the furthest reaches of the Galaxy, past the leading-edge of the Outer Rim, a ship sluices through the stars.

“Supreme Leader,” Captain Mitaka salutes as he steps through the port that leads to the lite-craft’s small main bridge. Pale white light from the tracklights above ripples across his new medallions. His leather gleams as he moves to attention at the base of the dais. “We are approaching the planet’s exosphere. Estimated touchdown is in t-minus ten minutes.”

At the very brink of the bridge, where durasteel meets diamond-glass, dressed plainly in elegant black, the Supreme Leader stands in front of the ship’s single panoramic viewport. Through his reflection, he stares out at the dark ether studded sparsely by stars, mirrored back to itself on the surface of his cool, clear eyes.

His hands are folded benignly behind his back.

He angles his chin to give the officer his profile over his shoulder. “Did you bring what I asked for?”

The Captain hesitates before he answers, “Yes, sir.”

The sound of metal kissing sweetly on metal rings out as slowly, he sets the object on the deck’s main terminal.

The Sith’s saber.

“Excellent,” the Supreme Leader turns back to the vastness that is the universe beyond his Galaxy. Its infinitude reminds him he owns nothing at all.

Inside him, his adrenaline thrashes. His blood boils over and crashes against his lungs.  

“Prepare the crew for landing,” he says calmly.

He does not hear the doors close behind him for the ravenous beat of his heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world is soaked in perpetual sunset.

Its sun is an older one, a red giant, swollen from the hydrogen gas it’s consumed from its core. Its pale crimson light washes the sands rose where they’ve landed. Scarlet reflecting off the still surface of the ocean stains the sky shades of amber and amaranth. Beyond the bay, the tree line casts deep purple shadows back into the forest, as white birds with stiff, spanning wings wheel above. He can make out their warbling cries over the gentle, rhythmic roar of the surf, whispering _hush_ with its foaming reach as it fans out then withdraws from the blushing shore.

He sent her to the most beautiful place he could think of.

He has dreamed of this day a thousand times.

“Sir,” the Captain and a small league of elite guards are gathered behind him. They await his command with breath abated.

“Wait here,” he tells them.

“But sir, it’s been six cycles. She could be anywhere on the island. How will you-”

He is already moving across the sand.

The forest exhales, sighing a zephyr out at the ocean. He tastes salt and soil and the richness of fertile rot and living things on his tongue. The breeze sifts a few strands of his hair come loose from its severe style, the sunlight turns them scarlet-gold. Behind him, his great coat lifts and snaps over the deep wells his polished boots make in the sand.

The warm, oxygen-rich air of this world aches in his lungs.

Past their border, the woods are quiet. Fallen leaves and dark earth soften his approach. Red, granular light pours down through the cracks in the canopy and strikes sepia across the riotous flora. His hands are slick inside his gloves, pouring sweat, as his heart beats out of time with the breath sieving through his mouth.

He is lost, but she is leading him. He feels her gravity drawing him in by his bones.

_Rey-_

A churning sound in the distance is her answer to his heartcall.

He follows it, lets it guide his swift steps over the forest. The air turns cooler, denser as he draws closer.

Damp.

The rushing grows louder as the vegetation becomes a thick, verdant lush that obscures the ground. The forest grows darker.

His blood thrums, he can feel his throat tightening, gut winding up.

He breaks into a clearing drowning in red-orange light.

She is naked and barefooted on the slick, dark bedrock at the base of a titanic waterfall. The fall is completely stopped. At its heart, its pool is at least ten meters deeper than the bank he stands on.

But there is no water at the base of the fall.

It is standing all around her, spanning meters into the air, towering crystalline walls that reach shimmering towards the open slice of sky. Washed in the light of the swollen red star, they ripple and gleam like living garnet. They pulse with the thundering, staccato beat of his heart.

And just like his heart, she is at their center.

_Rey._

At the slick, black-rock edge of the streambed, the Supreme Leader kneels down on one knee.

Their eyes meet across the small distance. Sound recedes, he loses track of the call of birds and animals and of the murmuring wind through the trees and the rushing roar of the towering waters. He hears only her sigh his name.

“Ahm’tage.”

Her large, wet eyes shine like gold in the red-toned light.

She approaches warily, breathing shaking as his does, as if she too cannot believe this moment is real.

Her bare body glistens, rose-colored beads of water slipping down its contours, her long hair slicked down to the skin of her breasts and shoulders. She is much fuller than when he sent her here. Much stronger than before.

The delicate flesh of her neck where her collar once chaffed her is healed but scarred. The taut, new skin shines like moonstone. It is the last specter of the Sith.

To him, she could not be more beautiful. More whole. He cannot blink, cannot breathe for looking at her. He tries to speak, but his voice will not restart.

When she is close enough, he reaches out.

Just a touch with one hand, more reverent than sensual, leather fingertips drawing feather-light down the smooth, freckled skin of her stomach. He does not know if he is still welcome inside this body, the last place he will ever call home. If she will desire him now that her life does not depend upon it-

Her breath catches. She winds her wet, trembling fingers through his hair and steps into him, pressing his face into her belly. She drenches him, holding on so hard it hurts.

His arms close around her just as tightly, he wrings a sob from her that she smothers when she cants his head in her hand and kisses him.

Hard and deep and long.

 _Glory_ , sings the sun, as she twines her tongue around his and does not let go.

Not until he lays her down with quaking hands and shivering heart into the cool silt of the streambank and makes love to her. His touch tells her everything he cannot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They break free of the tree line onto the beach just as the world’s crescent moons begin their arc through the stars.

She wears his great coat to hide her nakedness, but there is no covering the evidence of their coupling. It is written in the silt-streaks from her fingertips smearing sweetly as he moved inside her, it is in the bits of his bright hair that stand straight up. It is in the flush of her cheeks and the heaviness of her eyelids, and in his lax, idle gait as he bears her like a bride in his arms back to his ship.

It is in the life already taking root inside of her, knitting itself in her soft, sacred dark.

His new High Commander will surely chide him when he returns. She is cautious of this new kind of alliance, anxious for what the future holds now that the Sith is gone and this girl is the last of her kind. Nothing in their Galaxy may stop her. She is unbridled now.

She is unleashed.

 _“But what_ is _she?”_ Phasma insisted as they walked together down the bridge to his lite-craft, _“Is she a Jedi? A Sith?”_

By the light of the moons reflecting off the waters, and the white glow from his ship’s maw, he gazes down upon her face cradled against his heart. The Sith’s saber is curled between her breast, held tightly in her two hands. Its bled kyber sings serenely out at the surrounding night.

 _“She is my lady,”_ he said.

“Hush, sweet,” he soothes as the hollow whine of the turbines make her lashes flicker. "We are nearly there."

She nuzzles deeper, satisfied for the moment to seek shelter in his chest from the sand his ship whips off the shore as it winds up to carry them home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A fic by PastelWonder.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your readership. This work is a very different style from my usual, and I appreciate all your support and encouragement as I tried something new.
> 
> *Please* leave me a comment down below so that I can thank you personally for reading. And if you are too busy at the moment, shy or uninclined, let me tell you here that you are a wonder and I am grateful for you.
> 
> To find more of my work, check out my author page. And always, come chat with me on Tumblr.
> 
> I'll see you in my next one. Eat Pray Pastel.

**Author's Note:**

> I was very inspired by the themes in Ex Machina, a gorgeous, important film. If you haven't seen it, I cannot recommend it to you enough.
> 
> Your comments and kudos are appreciated. If you would like to be friends, find me on Tumblr: https://royramsey.tumblr.com/


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